THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE
MAN-EATER SHARK
body at the expense of its brain, for it is
a sluggish, stupid glutton, about six
times as long as an average man. At
home in the Arctic regions, it sometimes
makes visits as far south as Cape Cod,
the British Isles, and Oregon. It is most
often observed lying quietly on the sur
face, apparently dozing and easily ap
proached, but at times, when hungry, it
rouses itself and fiercely attacks whales,
biting huge pieces out of their sides and
tails, and when feeding on the carcass
of a whale which has been killed by
hunters it is so voracious that it permits
spears and knives to be thrust into it
without seeming to take any notice.
One of the most prodigious and per
haps the most formidable of sharks is
the "man-eater" (Carcharodon carcha
rias). It roams through all temperate
and tropical seas and everywhere is an
object of dread. Its maximum length is
40 feet and its teeth are 3 inches long.
While there are few authentic instances
of sharks attacking human beings, there
have undoubtedly been many cases where
sharks simply swallowed people who had
fallen overboard, just as they would
swallow any other food. How easy it
would be for a man-eater to devour a
person whole may be judged from the
finding of an entire hundred-pound sea
lion in the stomach of a 30-foot shark on
the California coast. A certain man
,eater 362 feet long had jaws 20 inches
wide, inside measure, and teeth 22
inches long. This may have been the
"great fish" of the scripture narrative,
and it is possible that at that time much
larger man-eaters existed than are now
known, as shark teeth with cutting edges
5 inches long have been found on the
sea-bottom, and these are believed by
naturalists to have belonged to sharks
not long dead. The phosphate beds of
South Carolina yield very large fossil
teeth of a shark which was related to the
man-eater of the present day; judging
from the comparative size of these teeth,
Professor Goode thought that sharks 70
or 80 feet long must have been common.
THE "GREAT FISH" WHICH SWALLOWED
JONAH
Many years ago a Norwegian bishop
in a learned paper brought to the at
tention of the scientific and theological
worlds a shark which he attempted to
prove must have been the "great fish"
that swallowed Jonah. This was the
basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus),
known also as the elephant or bone shark,
which is an inhabitant of the polar seas,
but occasionally strays as far south as
Virginia and California, and in former
years was not rare on the United States
and British coasts. The species has the
habit at times of collecting in schools at
the surface and basking in the sun with
its back partly out of the water.
It
reaches a maximum length of 50 feet
and is exceeded in size by only three or
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